Navigating Climate Emotions at Birkbeck Climate Festival 2025: Holding Grief, Making Space for Action
On 19 March 2025, we gathered at Birkbeck Central for an informal but deeply affecting session as part of the Birkbeck Climate Festival 2025. Titled Climate Emotions: Navigating Anxiety, Grief, and Solastalgia, the event invited participants to slow down and sit with the feelings many of us carry about the climate crisis—feelings we often suppress, rationalise, or struggle to name.
Led in collaboration with Dr Clea McEnery-West of the Birkbeck Centre for Counselling, the session attempted to offer both structure and spaciousness for a kind of thinking that is not always given room in academic or activist spaces: thinking that begins in the body, in discomfort, in disorientation.
Using reflection prompts drawn from Sally Weintrobe’s Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare (Bloomsbury, 2021), participants were invited to pick a slip from a box—each containing a phrase like ‘Feeling Uncontained’, ‘Feeling Overwhelmed’, or ‘Feeling Kind’. What followed was not a therapeutic intervention in the traditional sense, but something closer to what Weintrobe herself describes: a container in which difficult, contradictory feelings could be held long enough to be thought about.
Feeling uncontained
We began with “Feeling Uncontained,” and quickly the session moved into rich and sometimes difficult terrain. As Weintrobe writes, when we feel uncontained in the face of ecological collapse, we risk becoming Chicken Little: desperately trying to pass our panic on to others as a way of ridding ourselves of it. Participants reflected on how this sense of being emotionally unbounded can push us into despair—or, alternatively, dissociation. As McEnery-West explained, psychotherapeutically, the concept of feeling uncontained draws on Wilfred Bion’s theory of the “container-contained” dynamic, in which the caregiver—typically the mother—receives, holds, and helps process overwhelming emotional states. When this capacity breaks down, either in early life or in response to crisis, emotions can flood the psyche without structure, becoming unmanageable. In the climate context, this uncontainment may reflect not only a psychological response but also a symbolic rupture: the Earth itself has long been imagined as a maternal figure—a containing presence, terra mater, or Mother Earth. When ecological systems collapse, when the Earth no longer feels like a safe or nurturing ground, we are left without the holding environment we once trusted. To feel uncontained, then, is to register both a personal and planetary breakdown of containment—an emotional and symbolic disintegration that demands new ways of holding, thinking, and relating. Here, the concept of solastalgia—the homesickness you feel while still at home, when your environment has changed beyond recognition—proved especially resonant, with several participants registering this feeling in their own lives.
While the session moved through feelings of sadness, shame, and grief, what emerged was not paralysis, but a gentle invitation toward transformation. Our sadness, we suggested, has something to teach us—not just about ourselves, but about what we value, and what we fear losing. At one point, sadness brought a striking quiet into the room—a stillness that felt weighty and real. It is hard to speak when we are sad, and that difficulty itself teaches us something: that grief slows us down, resists easy articulation, and asks us to listen more deeply, to ourselves and to one another. As I noted in the opening remarks, emotional awareness is itself a form of action. Before we can organise, act, or change, we must first allow ourselves to feel—to bear witness to what is passing and what might still be saved.
Although time did not allow for us to complete Part Two of the session—which included more dynamic emotional explorations around care, omnipotence, and frameworks of responsibility—we hope to return to this material in a future workshop. The role-play activity we had planned (and may yet explore in a follow-up session) would have placed participants in a fictional yet highly relatable scenario: queuing for coffee at work just as breaking news reveals that their employer has been implicated in greenwashing and environmental harm. Participants would take on roles such as the Anxious Activist, the Grieving Parent, the Denier, or the Solastalgia Survivor—each navigating their emotional response in real time.
This scenario offers fertile ground for thinking not only about how individuals process climate information, but how we negotiate collective emotion in shared spaces. What does it mean, psychotherapeutically speaking, to be “uncontained” in a queue, surrounded by others also trying to hold in or make sense of sudden environmental shame, loss, or rage? The uncontainment in this scene is not pathological—it is public, relational, and ethically charged. What role can institutions like universities or other places of work play in helping to re-contain that emotion—not to repress it, but to offer frameworks of care in which it can become bearable and transformative? Indeed, the idea of frameworks of care—another concept we had hoped to explore—offers one way forward. From signs on buses that prioritise vulnerable passengers to large-scale systems like the NHS, these are the cultural and infrastructural “good objects” that help us stay attached to hope, even in the face of despair. As Weintrobe argues, it’s not always the severity of trauma that determines whether we cope, but our access to these stabilising figures and systems.
This session also served as an early introduction to our BA Environment, Culture, and Communication programme, and in particular, our new module on Climate Change Communication: Feeling, Thinking, Acting. It offered a glimpse into the kinds of conversations we hope to foster in the programme—the practice of making space—for grief, for hope, and for the many contradictions that accompany our desire to live ethically in a damaged world.
New pathways for climate engagement
Participants left the session having developed valuable skills in emotional literacy, reflective listening, and climate communication—skills that are increasingly vital in both educational and professional contexts. They learned to identify and articulate complex emotional responses to environmental change, to sit with discomfort without rushing to fix or silence it, and to recognise the ethical potential of emotions like grief, guilt, and hope. Running sessions like this in other organisations—whether academic, governmental, or corporate—could open up new pathways for climate engagement, helping teams to build emotional resilience, foster deeper collaboration, and move beyond apathy or overwhelm into considered, collective action.
To close this short reflection, I want to emphasise a line from the session’s final remarks: “Simply reflecting on your emotions and how you hold and relate to them is a form of action in itself.” In a time of relentless climate data and policy talk, making space to feel—collectively, vulnerably—may be one of the most radical acts we can commit to. Thank you to all who attended, listened, and shared. We look forward to continuing these conversations—and these feelings—together.